REUTERS MAGAZINE-The drone war

(David Rohde is a Reuters columnist. Any opinions expressed are
his own.)

By David Rohde

Jan 17 They kill without warning, are
comparatively cheap, risk no American lives, and produce
triumphant headlines. Over the last three years, drone strikes
have quietly become the Obama administration's weapon of choice
against terrorists.

Since taking office, President Barack Obama has unleashed
five times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush authorized in
his second term in the White House. He has transformed drone
attacks from a rarely used tactic that killed dozens each year
to a twice-weekly onslaught that killed more than 1,000 people
in Pakistan in 2010. Last year, American drone strikes spread to
Somalia and Libya as well.

In the wake of the troubled, trillion-dollar American
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes are a talisman
in Washington. To cash-strapped officials, drones eliminate the
United States' enemies at little human, political, or financial
cost.

The sweeping use of drone strikes in Pakistan, though, has
created unprecedented anti-American sentiment in that country.
While U.S. intelligence officials claim that only a handful of
civilians have died in drone attacks, the vast majority of
Pakistanis believe thousands have perished. Last year, the
Pakistani government apparently blocked American drone strikes
after tensions escalated between the two governments.

After a CIA contractor killed two Pakistanis in January and
American commandos killed Osama bin Laden in March, there were
no drone strikes there for weeks at a time. In November, drone
strikes stopped again after an American airstrike killed 26
Pakistani soldiers near the border with Afghanistan. As of late
December, there had been no strikes in Pakistan for six weeks,
the longest pause since 2008, and a glaring example of the
limitations of drone warfare.

My perspective on drones is an unusual one. In November
2008, the Afghan Taliban kidnapped two Afghan colleagues and me
outside Kabul and ferried us to the tribal areas of Pakistan.
For the next seven months, we were held captive in North and
South Waziristan, the focus of the vast majority of American
drone strikes during that period. In June 2009, we escaped.
Several months later, I wrote about the experience in a series
of articles for the New York Times, my employer at the time.

Throughout our captivity, American drones were a frequent
presence in the skies above North and South Waziristan.
Unmanned, propeller-driven aircraft, they sounded like a small
plane - a Piper Cub or Cessna-circling overhead. Dark specks in
a blue sky, they could be spotted and tracked with the naked
eye. Our guards studied their flight patterns for indications
of when they might strike. When two drones appeared overhead
they thought an attack was imminent. Sometimes it was, sometimes
it was not.

The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is
impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they
circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant
reminder of imminent death. Drones fire missiles that travel
faster than the speed of sound. A drone's victim never hears the
missile that kills him.

Our Afghan and Pakistani Taliban guards despised the drones
and disparaged them as a cowardly way for America to wage war.
The 2009 surge in drone attacks in Pakistan prompted our guards
to hate Obama even more than they hated Bush.

The most difficult day of our captivity was March 25, 2009.
Late that afternoon, a drone attack occurred just outside our
house in Makeen, South Waziristan. Missiles fired by an American
drone had struck dozens of yards away. After chunks of mud and
bits of shrapnel landed in our courtyard. Our guards hustled
me down a hillside and ordered me to get inside a station
wagon. They told me to lie down, place a scarf over my face, and
say nothing. We all knew that if local militants enraged by the
attack learned an American prisoner was in the area, I would be
killed. As I lay in the car, I heard militants shout with fury
as they collected their dead. A woman wailed somewhere in the
distance. I silently recited the Lord's Prayer.

After 15 minutes, the guards took me back to our house and
explained what had happened. Missiles from American drones had
struck two cars, they said, killing seven Arab militants and
local Taliban fighters. Later, I learned that one of our guards
suggested I be taken to the site of the attack and ritually
beheaded. The chief guard overruled him.

The strikes fueled a vicious paranoia among the Taliban. For
months, our guards told us of civilians being rounded up,
accused of working as American spies and hung in local markets.
Immediately after that attack in South Waziristan, a feverish
hunt began for a local spy who the Taliban were convinced had
somehow secretly guided the Americans to the two cars.

Several days after the strike, our guards told us foreign
militants had arrested a local man and accused him of guiding
the drones. After the jihadists disemboweled the villager and
chopped off his leg, he "confessed" to being an American spy,
they said. Then the militants decapitated the man and hung
his corpse in the local bazaar as a warning.

My time in captivity filled me with enormous sympathy for
the Pakistani civilians trapped between the deranged Taliban and
ruthless American technology. They inhabit a hell on earth in
the tribal areas. Both sides abuse them. I am convinced Taliban
claims that only civilians die in drone strikes are false, as
are American claims that only militants do. Drone strikes
are not a silver bullet against militancy, nor are they a
wanton practice that fells only civilians. They weaken
militant groups without eliminating them.

During my time in the tribal areas, it was clear that drone
strikes disrupted militant operations. Taliban commanders
frequently changed vehicles and moved with few bodyguards to
mask their identities. Afghan, Pakistani, and foreign Taliban
avoided gathering in large numbers. The training of suicide
bombers and roadside bomb makers was carried out in small groups
to avoid detection.

Altogether, 22 drone strikes killed at least 76 militants
and 41 civilians in North and South Waziristan during our seven
months in captivity, according to news reports. Some strikes
clearly succeeded. Our guards reacted with fury, for example,
when Uzbek bomb makers they knew were killed in a drone
strike. They also showed my Afghan colleagues the graves of
children they said died in strikes.

It is impossible for journalists, human rights groups, or
outside investigators to definitively determine the ratio of
civilians to militants killed by American drones. The United
States refuses to release details or publicly acknowledge the
attacks, which they insist are classified. Militants, meanwhile,
refuse to allow unfettered access to the area.

The strikes kill senior leaders and weaken Al Qaeda, the
Pakistani Taliban, and the Afghan Taliban, but militants use
exaggerated reports of civilian deaths to recruit volunteers and
stoke anti-Americanism. I believe the drones create a stalemate
between militant groups and U.S. intelligence agencies.

While drones are seen as a triumph of American technology in
the United States, they provoke intense public anger in
Pakistan. Exaggerated Taliban claims of civilian deaths are
widely believed by the Pakistanis, who see the strikes as a
flagrant violation of the United States' purported support for
human rights. Analysts believe that killing a senior militant
in a drone strike is a tactical victory but a loss over the long
term because it weakens public support for an American-backed
crackdown on militancy in Pakistan, which many analysts think is
essential.

"In the short term, it puts (the militants) on the back
foot," a former United Nations official in the region who spoke
on condition of anonymity told me. "In the overall community,
it's devastating."

Worsening the problem, the U.S. has allowed the Pakistani
military to falsely claim that it has no control over the drone
strikes. American drones operate out of Pakistani air force
bases with the permission of Pakistani forces, yet the Pakistani
public is told that a foreign power is carrying out unilateral
attacks inside their country and violating their sovereignty.

Pakistan is not the only country experiencing drone attacks.
Since 2001, the United States has carried out drone strikes in
five other countries - Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and
Somalia. In Libya, the American military carried out 146 drone
strikes during NATO's seven-month bombing campaign against
the Gaddafi regime. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA
and the American military do not disclose the number
of attacks, but a senior American military official
put the number at "dozens" since 2001.

The most alarming pattern has emerged in Yemen and Somalia.
The exact number of strikes in both countries is unknown. Local
media in Yemen report strikes as often as once a week, but
American officials decline to confirm that.

On September 30, 2011, a drone flying over Yemen set a new
precedent. Without a trial or any public court proceeding, the
United States government killed two American citizens, Anwar Al
Awlaki and Samir Khan. The target of the attack was Awlaki, a
New Mexico-born Yemeni-American whose charismatic preaching
inspired terrorist attacks around the world, including the 2009
killing of 13 soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas. Civil liberties
groups argued that a dangerous new threshold had been crossed.
For the first time in American history, the United States had
executed two of its citizens without trial.

The Obama Administration cited a secret Justice Department
memorandum as justification for the attack. Its authors
contended that Awlaki's killing was legal due to his role in
attacks on the United States and his presence in an area where
American forces could not easily capture him. The administration
declined to publicly release the full document.

Many experts insist a new approach to drones is desperately
needed. Strikes should continue, they say, but in a vastly
different manner. Among the changes they suggest: The U.S. must
end its absurd practice of refusing to publicly acknowledge
attacks. Many analysts also believe Washington should accede to
longstanding demands from the Pakistani, Afghan, and other local
governments for more control over the use of drones. Their
reasoning is simple: Along with the United States, local
officials will then bear the burden of building local public
support for drone strikes.

"They have asked for sharing the responsibility, but also
means sharing the technology," Vali Nasr, a Tufts University
professor and former senior Obama Administration adviser on
Pakistan, told me. "We have resisted that, but the benefit is
that you give the local government ownership."

For all their shortcomings, drones do present a tempting
though far from perfect martial option. Drones can reach
jihadists in remote mountains and deserts inaccessible to
American and local troops. They have taken out top militants,
such as the Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, who
was responsible for the killing of thousands of Pakistani
civilians in suicide bombings. And they have slowed the training
of suicide bombers and roadside bomb makers, most of whose
victims are innocent Afghan and Pakistani bystanders, not
American troops.

But drones alone are not the answer. Over the long term, it
will be moderate Muslims who defeat militancy, not technology.

Next In Top News

WASHINGTON U.S President-elect Donald Trump has asked Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn to head his White House National Economic Council, a group that coordinates economic policy across agencies, NBC News reported on Friday.

WASHINGTON U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is expected to pick U.S. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a strong advocate of increased oil and gas development who is skeptical about climate change, to run the Department of the Interior, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.

Reuters is the news and media division of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters is the world's largest international multimedia news agency, providing investing news, world news, business news, technology news, headline news, small business news, news alerts, personal finance, stock market, and mutual funds information available on Reuters.com, video, mobile, and interactive television platforms. Learn more about Thomson Reuters products: